If you want to know what technology will change the world, watch young mothers

...and don't watch teenage boys - young mothers have no time for any technology that isn't useful and doesn't work. Clay Shirky made this point speaking at a 2005 TED conference. A slide of the video is below (I put it up btw because it is showing a very useful feature TED uses - see the pink rectangles above the slider of where the video is, and the box that tell you the topic under discussion at that pint in the video)



As Shirky pointed out at the time, young mothers were the biggest group on Meetup as it allowed them to recreate social networks. More recent data suggests women are taking to social networks and blogging far more, and use the Social Net more than men do something that made us wonder if Web 3.0 will be a more of a female network in style and culture

This echoes another interesting post from University of Cape Town academic Dr Bosch-Ogada who looked at teenage girl's behaviour with mobile social networking

Bosch has also done very interesting ethnographic research, most recently focusing on girls' use of mobile social networks like MXit. In a recent article in the Commonwealth Journal of Youth Studies, Dr Bosch-Ogada explores adolescent girls' use of MXit, a cellphone based instant messaging service, in Cape Town, South Africa.

Her study suggests that girls talk on cellphones more than boys; and that girls use cellphones to maintain a kind of "intimacy in their social relations".

Incidentally, a key part of the work was looking at how a mobile gateway to IM would work, in this case for maths homework:

[Doctor Math] taps into the facility that allows MXit cellphone users to communicate with online computer based chat programmes like MSN or Yahoo Chat. They set up an account at jabber.org and called their facility dr.math.help.me, which targeted learners who needed help with maths homework after school hours when teachers were not available. Researchers found that the youth who participated (their sample was limited to one high school) were surprised to find that they could use their phones “as a tool instead of a toy or convenience,” and found that learners developed a social relationship with the anonymous Dr Maths, often logging just to say hello, or asking for counseling, even though tutors were prohibited from asking or answering personal questions.

Maths homework acting as a "social object" creating social relationships online..... if that's possible, who knows what can be achieved.